Traditional broadband communication network design has been focused on enabling communication services among users, such that the user traffic always traverses the network core infrastructure (i.e., core network or CN). See, e.g., 3GPP TS 23.401, 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) enhancements for Evolved Universal Terrestrial Radio Access Network (E-UTRAN) access (Release 11), the disclosure of which is incorporated by reference herein in its entirety.
Such a design approach offers some user management benefits to network operators, such as the ability to authenticate the user equipment (UE), and to track the user behavior in terms of resource utilization (e.g., such as bandwidth consumption on the air interface and amount of data traffic uploaded/downloaded over time).
In addition, enforcing traffic to traverse the core of the broadband network enables the support of Lawful Interception (LI) of data and/or voice calls by law authorities. This is because the CN has explicit access to user traffic (since such traffic goes through the core) and thus can provide mechanisms to LI entities for obtaining the traffic exchanged between specific users, upon request. See, e.g., 3GPP TS 33.107, 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; 3G Security; Lawful Interception architecture and functions (Release 11]; and 3GPP TS 33.108, 3rd Generation Partnership Project; Technical Specification Group Services and System Aspects; 3G Security; Handover interface for Lawful Interception (LI) (Release 11), the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference herein in their entireties.